GlobalGiving connects you to the causes and community-based projects you care about through their online marketplace. Joan Ochi, the Director of Marketing Communications and Robert Dubois, a Marketing Associate who provides support to the organizations online social media strategy, share how GlobalGiving uses direct marketing to encourage people to donate to the causes they support.

Both Joan and Robert have experience in marketing-communications. Prior to GlobalGiving, Joan provided marketing support for clients such as Fannie Mae and HP. Robert worked at Burns Marketing, Colorado’s fifth-largest marketing-communications agency.

BB: What was your biggest achievement on the social media front in 2008?

GG: Being a part of America’s Giving Challenge - an initiative spearheaded by the Case Foundation earlier this year. The objective of America’s Giving Challenge was to inspire Americans to use online tools such as widgets to participate in a fundraising for a cause - either a project on GlobalGiving or an organization on Network for Good. The Challenge ran for about 6 weeks and attracted over 130 “fundraisers,” more than 13,000 donors, and generated approximately $364,000 in donations. Interestingly, many of the top fundraisers who participated in the Challenge relied not just on social media tools such as widgets and blogs, but used traditional outreach vehicles such as phone calls and email messages as well.

We continued to experiment with other social media tools (Facebook, our own blog, Second Life, etc) as well, and learned that every tools is not right for every organization. Participating in and maintaining a presence on social networks is time consuming and resource intensive, and we found that merely having a presence on social networks has for the most part not been effective in developing online communities or building relationships with new or potential donors.

BB: Tell us about your organization’s marketing/communications strategy for 2009.

GG: Going forward, we are focusing on both acquisition and retention by creating a more engaging website experience - one that will motivate people to return regularly to take advantage of and participate in the more community-oriented features on GlobalGiving. Some of the functionality under development include fundraising tools (which would allow individuals to come together to raise funds for a project in which they have a common interest), tell-a-friend features that enable viral marketing, online discussions between donors and project leaders, and enhanced donor profiles.

BB: What big hairy audacious social media goals will help you achieve your objectives next year?

GG: Once again, we feel that community – oriented features – the ability for donors to connect and interact with project leaders, as well as with other donors – are becoming increasingly important. For example, if I can see what projects my friends support, I might be more likely to support those projects, too. We want our donors to feel connected - with projects and the people that run them, with other donors, and with the broader GlobalGiving community in general. Today, we enable donors to add comments to reports posted by progress leaders - we’re working to make this more dynamic and hopefully turn this “back and forth” into interesting, lively, and educational conversations. And of course, we’ll continue to promote widgets and integrate more video and audio (e.g. podcasts) into our site.

BB: How do you plan to integrate your social media efforts with the rest of your marketing mix (e.g., direct mail, email marketing, mobile, media relations, etc.)?

GG: We typically use email communications to encourage individuals to visit gg.com and engage on our site. Traditional media/public relations also tends to be very effective in driving qualified visitors to our site. Our goal is to create a unified/consistent user experience, so we employ landing pages that are customized based on where the person may be coming from - e.g. if we place an ad, we’ll direct viewers of that ad to a specific landing page that might leverage the same look/feel/messaging, etc.

BB: What is one challenge you face when executing new, social and/or digital media strategy? How are you overcoming this hurdle?

GG: Being a small organization, we have limited resources and therefore a very long wish list of desired features and enhancements - and of course, we can never get these features in as quickly as we’d like - so prioritization is especially important. In addition, it’s hard to evaluate how much time and resources to put into a new (and perhaps unproven) social media tool. We have to ask ourselves “is this the next best thing, or something that may fizzle within the next six months?”

BB: What will be the final measure of success for your digital plans?

GG: Put simply - meeting and exceeding our goals, usually around donation volume as well as other more standard web metrics such as conversion, bounce rate, repeat visitors, etc. As we expand our community, we will implement goals related to community participation and engagement, referrals, etc.

BB: Do you foresee any particularly enticing opportunities that can help nonprofits/causes reach their social media goals in 2009? Any advice for how to take advantage of related trends?

GG: There’s so much out there that it’s tricky to stay on top of all the latest developments. Reading blogs like this one :-) and taking advantage of the myriad of opportunities out there - from Google applications and seminars, to resources like Progressive Exchange, Net Squared, TechSoup - and you’d be amazed of the tips we get from Twitter, too! It’s important not to try to use every social media tool at once - figure out what your organization’s needs are, and then identify the tools that you think would best meet your specific needs.

PS. Could 2009 be the year that mobile actually breaks through as a social media tool in the US in a big way???

Online video has been an increasingly hot topic for nonprofits this past year. As fortune would have it, I crashed NetSquared’s Net Tuesday meet up while breezing through San Francisco last week. Involver’s team of online video demi-gods presented new case studies from Save Darfur and Kiva.

Involver (think “engager” not “revolver”) offers an intriguing platform with the goal of “making video marketing accessible to all.” The company has essentially widgetized videos. It’s one thing to simply embed a video (an ubiquitous feature for most video networks). Then there’s Involver shooting the moon, making it “stupid easy” to share and grab, take action and subscribe through their supported videos. Their demo video is a good example.

Involver’s Nikki Serapio (who disclosed previous work with Save Darfur), named the problem with video.

1. Distribution: Getting it out there
2. Engagement: When presented the right way video is instrumental to taking action
3. Tracking: Which video viewers are the true enthusiasts who can be engaged?

From the company’s website: “Our current self-serve end-to-end platform is the starting point for any marketer planning to create a video campaign for social networks. We let companies build, launch, promote, manage and monitor video campaigns that reach millions of social networking users with the greatest opportunity to convert viewers into customers. [Image credit: Involver]

Building shareability and calls to action into a video = easy engagement.

Using the Involver platform for a few months, Kiva.org garnered video 160,000 video views, 66,000 of which were organic.

• The average number of times each campaign member asked friends to watch the video: 12.7
• Number of people who added the Kiva video to their Facebook profiles: 1,400.

Creative incentives = more word of mouth.

Save Darfur established a points-based incentive program for their video campaign (e.g., 10 points for passing on a video, 5 points for submitting a photo.)

• They found that the people who were forwarding videos, getting points and leaving comments were the same folks who helped offline.
• It helps that people tend to care about what others are doing - with thanks due to the meandering, nosey ping-filled feeds of Facebook.

The point, as Nikki aptly puts, is to make a video immediately shareable so it’s easy to evangelize.

Similar groups offer platforms for cause-focused videos. Involver’s is the first seamless mechanism I’ve seen that allows you to bundle more than the regular grab and share features of a video widget. Take a look at CauseCast and DoGooderTV (from See3) for more options.

Involver is offering a free pilot of their platform until the end of September. Private beta launched just yesterday. Sign up today at www.involver.com/signup for free access. Tomorrow you can decide whether or not to pay the subscription fee.

Social media how-to’s and primers have a shelf life of a millisecond, roughly. These blogging tips and social network tricks, while thorough, are usually manufactured by the hands of one or two people.* Quickly outdated, this single-lens content is easily trumped by evergreen collaboration. The latter of which is the calling card of We Are Media.

“Curated” by NTEN (the Nonprofit Technology Network) and Beth Kanter, We Are Media (formerly known as Be The Media) is a wiki-housed, group effort to develop a social media curriculum for nonprofits. It’s a work in progress: the community is tackling one module per week.

According to the site, We Are Media aims to “build this wiki and community into the “go-to place” for vetted resources about social media strategies and tools for nonprofits and/or individuals who work for or with nonprofits and need practical advice about getting started or to quickly access best practices, examples, or experience from other practitioners working in nonprofits.”

The team spirit approach has the potential to torch a time-honored tradition: stale silos of self-education across nonprofit learning. It’s also going to set the bar a little higher for corporate and government brethren, too.

This initiative matters.

• It’s a “community of practice.” Learn as you teach; teach as you learn. There is no better way to learn how to move someone up the participation ladder than to dive face first into the environment yourself. Beth is compiling a series of posts on “working wikily,” a job not for the fly-by-night practitioner.
• The focus is on smarter – not universal – use of Web 2.0. In other words, if the social media shoe doesn’t fit, don’t wear it. (Or it if does fit, what type, brand and supportive padding is worth it for your feet?)
• Tagged content, the living, breathing, searchable beauty of it all.
• Back up from a person committed to calling out patterns in discussion and content and figuring out where to throw more spaghetti. In the words of Michele Martin at The Bamboo Project, “As communities develop ever-evolving resources through tagging, blogging, adding to wikis, etc. there’s still a need for someone to comb through all that information and help make sense of it, particularly in terms of instructional design.” If only more online community managers possessed Beth’s innate ability to do so, we’d see less failures.

Major kudos are due to Beth, Holly Ross (Executive Director of NTEN), and the dozens of We Are Media participants. The contributions made today will help ensure our nation’s hands and feet - the social sector - aren’t swept away with the tidal wave of Web 2.0.

Rather, they’ll have the appropriate gear (from swimmies to wet suits to surf boards) to manuver.

[ Image credit: Surf's up? By 356bunnies ]

*Updated: The How-to’s are great, too, so keep reading them! While yes, the ways of the digital world change overnight, you’ll find valuable insight to strategic and tactical plays in such resources. Learning comes from all sides.